Another Word for Hunger - Heather Bartlett

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Résumé :

Another Word for Hunger is a spare, honest, and tender debut that nimbly contemplates the complications of love, mother/daughter relationships, loneliness, religion, sex, misogyny, queerness, and gender. At its essence, this collection is about desire and love, and the ways the two intersect-and don't. Short poems with short lines that cut with their sharp precision, this collection begins in adulthood and intimacy before journeying back to a time when notions of heteronormativity are challenged and examined. Here is a spectrum of formative experience: 'someday I will learn / what it means to want more / woman she says ...'

Another Word for Hunger imagines new and more inclusive spiritual practices, as when two lovers confess their sins to each other. Here there is fire, burning, hunger, thirst, biting, craving, and wanting as a deep sense of yearning looms. Here there is yearning for love, yes, but also for acceptance, for comfort, for understanding, and for a better world. It can be quelled at times, even seemingly quenched, but inevitably yearning returns as something painfully beautiful.